Attitude (psychology)
In psychology, an attitude "is a summary evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind". Attitudes include beliefs, emotional responses and behavioral tendencies. In the classical definition an attitude is persistent, while in more contemporary conceptualizations, attitudes may vary depending upon situations, context, or moods.
While different researchers have defined attitudes in various ways, and may use different terms for the same concepts or the same term for different concepts, two essential attitude functions emerge from empirical research. For individuals, attitudes are cognitive schema that provide a structure to organize complex or ambiguous information, guiding particular evaluations or behaviors. More abstractly, attitudes serve higher psychological needs: expressive or symbolic functions, maintaining social identity, and regulating emotions. Attitudes influence behavior at individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.
Attitudes are complex and are acquired through life experience and socialization. Key topics in the study of attitudes include attitude strength, attitude change, and attitude-behavior relationships. The decades-long interest in attitude research is due to the interest in pursuing individual and social goals, an example being the public health campaigns to reduce cigarette smoking.
Definitions
The term attitude with the psychological meaning of an internal state of preparedness for action was not used until the 19th century.The American Psychological Association defines attitude as "a relatively enduring and general evaluation of an object, person, group, issue, or concept on a dimension ranging from negative to positive. Attitudes provide summary evaluations of target objects and are often assumed to be derived from specific beliefs, emotions, and past behaviors associated with those objects."
For much of the 20th century, the empirical study of attitudes was at the core of social psychology. Attitudes can be derived from affective information, cognitive information, and behavioral information, often predicting subsequent behavior. Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, for example, define an attitude as "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor."
Though it is sometimes common to define an attitude as affect toward an object, affect is generally understood as an evaluative structure used to form an attitude object. Attitude may influence the attention to attitude objects, the use of categories for encoding information and the interpretation, judgement and recall of attitude-relevant information. These influences tend to be more powerful for strong attitudes which are accessible and based on elaborate supportive knowledge structure. The durability and impact of influence depend upon the strength formed from the consistency of heuristics. Attitudes can guide encoding information, attention and behaviors, even if the individual is pursuing unrelated goals.
Past research reflected the traditional notion that attitudes are simple tendencies to like or dislike attitude objects, while contemporary research has begun to adopt more complex perspectives. Recent advances on the mental structure of attitudes have suggested that attitudes might not always be simply positive or negative, but may include both positivity and negativity. In addition, strong and weak attitudes are associated with many different outcomes. Methodological advances have allowed researchers to consider with greater precision the existence and implications of possessing implicit and explicit attitudes.
A sociological approach relates attitudes to concepts of values and ideologies that conceptualize the relationship of thought to action at higher levels of analysis. Values represent the social goals which are used by individuals to orient their behaviors. Cross-cultural studies seek to understand cultural differences in terms of differences in values. For example, the individualism-collectivism dimension suggests that Western and Eastern societies differ fundamentally in the priority given to individual vs. group goals. Ideologies represent more generalized orientations that seek to make sense of related attitudes and values, and are the basis for moral judgements.
Most contemporary perspectives on attitudes permit that people can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object by holding both positive and negative beliefs or feelings toward the same object. Additionally, measures of attitude may include intentions, but are not always predictive of behaviors.
Explicit measures are of attitudes at the conscious level that are deliberately formed and easy to self-report. Implicit measures are of attitudes at an unconscious level, that function out of awareness. Both explicit and implicit attitudes can shape an individual's behavior. Implicit attitudes, however, are most likely to affect behavior when the demands are steep and an individual feels stressed or distracted.
Measurement
An attitude is a latent psychological construct, which consequently can only be measured indirectly. Commonly used measures include Likert scales which records agreement or disagreement with a series of belief statements. The semantic differential uses bipolar adjectives to measure the meaning associated with attitude objects. The Guttman scale focuses on items that vary in their degree of psychological difficulty. Supplementing these are several techniques that do not depend on deliberate responses such as unobtrusive, standard physiological, and neuroscientific measures. Following the explicit-implicit dichotomy, attitudes can be examined different measures.Explicit
Explicit measures tend to rely on self-reports or easily observed behaviors. These tend to involve bipolar scales. Explicit measures can also be used by measuring the straightforward attribution of characteristics to nominate groups. Explicit attitudes that develop in response to recent information, automatic evaluation were thought to reflect mental associations through early socialization experiences. Once formed, these associations are highly robust and resistant to change, as well as stable across both context and time. Hence the impact of contextual influences was assumed to be obfuscate assessment of a person's "true" and enduring evaluative disposition as well as limit the capacity to predict subsequent behavior.Implicit
Implicit measures are not consciously directed and are assumed to be automatic, which may make implicit measures more valid and reliable than explicit measures. For example, people can be motivated such that they find it socially desirable to appear to have certain attitudes. An example of this is that people can hold implicit prejudicial attitudes, but express explicit attitudes that report little prejudice. Implicit measures help account for these situations and look at attitudes that a person may not be aware of or want to show. Implicit measures therefore usually rely on an indirect measure of attitude. For example, the Implicit Association Test examines the strength between the target concept and an attribute element by considering the latency in which a person can examine two response keys when each has two meanings. With little time to carefully examine what the participant is doing they respond according to internal keys. This priming can show attitudes the person has about a particular object. People are often unwilling to provide responses perceived as socially undesirable and therefore tend to report what they think their attitudes should be rather than what they know them to be. More complicated still, people may not even be consciously aware that they hold biased attitudes. Over the past few decades, scientists have developed several measures to avoid these unconscious biases.Structure
Intra-attitudinal and inter-attitudinal structures
There is also considerable interest in intra-attitudinal and inter-attitudinal structure, which is how an attitude is made and how different attitudes relate to one another. Intra-attitudinal structures are how underlying attitudes are consistent with one another. The intra-attitudinal structure also follows the ABC model. Intra-attitudinal follows the ABC model by examining each part of the model. This connects different attitudes to one another and to more underlying psychological structures, such as values or ideology. Unlike intra-attitudinal structures, inter-attitudinal structures involve the strength of relations of more than one attitude within a network.Components
The classic, tripartite view offered by Rosenberg and Hovland in 1960 is that an attitude contains cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Empirical research, however, fails to support clear distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and behavioral intentions associated with a particular attitude. A criticism of the tripartite view of attitudes is that it requires cognitive, affective, and behavioral associations of an attitude to be consistent, but this may be implausible. Thus some views of attitude structure see the cognitive and behavioral components as derivative of affect or affect and behavior as derivative of underlying beliefs. "The cognitive component refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes associated with an object". "The affective component refers to feelings or emotions linked to an attitude object". "The behavioral component refers to behaviors or experiences regarding an attitude object".An influential model of attitude is the multi-component model, where attitudes are evaluations of an object that have affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. The affective component of attitudes refers to feelings or emotions linked to an attitude object. Affective responses influence attitudes in a number of ways. For example, many people are afraid or scared of spiders. So this negative affective response is likely to cause someone to have a negative attitude towards spiders. The behavioral component of attitudes refers to the way an attitude influences how a person acts or behaves. The cognitive component of attitudes refers to the beliefs, thoughts, and attributes that a person associates with an object. Many times a person's attitude might be based on the negative and positive attributes they associate with an object. As a result of assigning negative or positive attributes to a person, place, or object, individuals may behave negatively or positively towards them.